Are we addicted to overwhelm?
Before writing this - I turned the wifi off my computer and turned my phone off. I cannot receive any messages, notifications, interruptions or divert myself into distractions when my brain stutters for a moment in the midst of spewing thoughts onto this page.
How often do I do that - block out distractions completely? Not often enough.
More often than not, I’m swimming through an ocean of distractions, an uncontrolled environment of being constantly available, on call to whomever or whatever demands my attention, subject to the next force tugging me in its direction.
How would you predict this type of working environment affects our ability to focus?
Living life like this; constantly powering through unexpected obstacles cluttering the once-clear path between us and our task does not lead to productive nor effective work.
I’m actually writing this out of frustration after finding myself hopping between distractions instead of studying for my two exams this weekend (i.e. what I should be doing right now :)).
After finding myself frustrated and exhausted from the chaos which ensues each exam season - the ridiculously late nights (or early mornings), the unbearable stress which tightens in our chest when we’re “just not getting it” and the exam is tomorrow, the onset of panic as we fall behind our study schedules or the nervous energy brewing when the people around us seem to know the material inside and out, and we can’t help but feel unprepared or behind.
In addition to battling the academic pressure and the mental output we are required to exert during exams, we feel guilty for not taking care of ourselves after compromising on sleep, health, exercise, and social interactions for an extended period of time. As soon as the calendar reveals exam month, it seems like every bubble of our lives begins to rapidly deflate except perhaps studying and caffeine consumption.
After complaining about this to a very thoughtful and intelligent friend, I was faced with the question: Does it have to be this way?
My immediate internal response was - of course it does, it’s exams! Don’t you know how busy I am?
But then I thought more carefully… Is he right? Am I creating this sense of overwhelm, chaos and stress for myself?
There’s something oddly comforting about diving into an inevitably chaotic time with a relatively high degree of uncertainty of how things are going to go. It almost feels like there’s “too much to plan” sometimes. Nearly every semester of my university experience has been punctuated with 2-3 gruelling weeks of studying, six final exams, and a week of mental and physical recovery after exerting myself to a point approaching self-destruction.
Does it have to be this way?
I don’t think it does - for a few reasons: Perspective: The impact of one final on our life trajectory is most often a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.
Unless it’s your admission exam to the school or program of your dreams (and even then), let’s just put it all in perspective for a moment. I take approximately 6 final exams every semester, that’s 12 per year and will be 48 in my university career. Before that, I took about 6 each year of high school, so that brings us to approximately 72 exams by the time I graduate university. Seventy-two. That’s a pretty big number. And for the most part, I don’t have more than a blurry recollection of any of them - even the incredibly challenging or successful ones.
And yet - why does it feel like every time we’re taking a final that it is the most important thing and the results are going to have a dramatic impact on our lives? One amazing or tragic final probably won’t move our needle all that much. So despite the inertia of exam season being that of stress, fear and over-working - remember that you can make a decision to remove yourself from the be-all, end-all finals mentality and return back to the fact that this is just a temporarily demanding time where we should work hard, but ultimately isn’t making or breaking our life-path.
Preparation: Planning ahead is the single most effective remedy to uncertainty and overwhelm. It’s easy to forget that we do have control, to some degree, over how finals season is going to go. It’s easy to want to shut your computer and take your mind off of it when you see 5 exams in 5 days staring back at you. But the more we procrastinate facing the challenge that is ahead and how we’re going to deal with it, the worse off we will be to handle the circumstance when it inevitably arrives at our door-step. There’s no worse feeling than knowing we could have prepared better by simply planning ahead, rather than trying to shove more into our brains in a 24-hour-period. By being thoughtful about how we want these few weeks to go before they start, we can be proactive about the challenges we will face instead of reacting to everything as it happens.
Play the game: Finals are a mental game - you can be in control or be the victim, you get to choose.
Something I often forget is that our mindset going into an exam (or into studying for an exam) is one of the greatest factors which controls how we will perform or learn. When we begin to panic and let the feeling of stress and fear flood our senses, we have very little ability to direct our mental energy to the pressing task at hand. Conversely, if we can recognize this feeling as a deterrent from what needs to be done and instead focus on bringing our mind back to the present and staying calm, we have a shot at performing at the highest degree we can.
This is one of the lessons I learned from competitive gymnastics. After spending most of my gymnastics career focused on perfecting my skills, I realized I was neglecting the importance of training myself to be mentally resilient. Eventually, I realized the best gymnasts I knew were not the most capable, flexible, strongest or those performing the hardest skills, they were the ones who were the toughest mentally. Our coaches always told us gymnastics is 90% mental and 10% everything else, and while that sounds like a crazy breakdown, it’s quite true - and not just in gymnastics.
If you’re a high-achiever in academics, sports, music or anything else, you’ll eventually find yourself in a pool of extremely bright and capable individuals all trying to excel in the same tests/competitions/performances. Those who rise to the top are those who are able to remain in control of themselves and perform how they practice. This goes for academics just as much as any other competitive activity - the more we work on staying in control of our state of mind, the more we can focus on doing what we’ve trained to do.
How do we do this?
Practice. Despite meditation becoming something of a buzz-word these days, it is genuinely an excellent way to develop mental control and discipline. You are training the practice of bringing your mind back when it drifts off to somewhere you don’t want it to be. This skill can be applied when we begin to feel stressed about school or a performance in any field. That familiar tinge of panic is just our mind skirting into a place we don’t want it to go. We must train ourselves to bring it back. This can be done by meditating, taking 6 breaths, taking a lap around the building you’re in, or simply reminding ourselves that the stress is just another distraction we need to block out to focus on the task that is causing it. It’s not always easy to bring ourselves back when the worry sets in, but the more control we gain over our own mind, the more we free ourselves up to do what we’re genuinely capable of.
“Rule your mind or it will rule you.”
Ultimately, final season is an extreme time in the life of any student, and it puts us in situations which naturally induce stress and chaos - but we do get to decide how we’re going to navigate this time. To master final season: put it in perspective, prepare and plan (even on a daily basis), and train your mind to be in control.
Exams can be tricky, but the way we navigate these stressful times lays the foundation for how we will handle challenging situations in the future as well. When it comes to the variables we can control, let’s do what we can to master them.